Would you believe these? How about if we swore it was true?

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In a poll conducted mostly after the revelation by FBI director James Comey about emails found on former Congressman Anthony Weiner’s computer, Clinton’s lead among independent California voters dropped from 25 percent to only 9 percent. And Clinton, who leads Trump by 17 percent among those who haven’t voted, has only a 21 percent lead overall in the state. That’s down from 26 percent in the previous poll conducted by SurveyUSA and issued Tuesday by Southern California News Group and KABC/Eyewitness News. (AP file photos)

It’s the word of the day as pundits and politicos ponder this: Was this campaign season’s plethora of phony news stories and bogus tweets, most of which ended up passed around on Facebook and many of which made the Clinton camp seem downright menacing, one of the reasons Donald Trump was able to shock much of the planet and ascend to the Oval Office?

Not if you ask Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said in his defense to critics who claim the social-media site is awash in bogus news posts:

“Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook—of which it’s a very small amount of the content—influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea.”

Maybe he’s right, but much of the content was memorable — and many folks seemed to believe it. We decided to poke around and find ten of the more outrageous fake stories of the 2016 election.

Let’s start with candidate Trump’s very own Twitter account where, just days before the election he tweeted out this inflammatory bit: “Twitter, Google and Facebook are burying the FBI criminal investigation of Clinton.” No proof that was happening, and all three sites, in fact, had plenty of stories about the FBI’s probe into Clinton’s emails. But that didn’t stop the tweeted ”news alert” from taking on a life of its own, quickly being retweeted by 25,000 other twitterers and being “liked” 50,000 times.

When is ABC News not really ABC News? When a hoax version of the site appears with a story headlined “Donald Trump Protester Speaks Out: ‘I Was Paid $3,500 To Protest Trump’s Rally.'” The early October prank fooled Trump’s son Eric Trump, prompting him to tweet forth with “Finally, the truth comes out.” The story also generated hundreds of very real and very angry (on both sides) comments from readers.

Twitter? Trust, if you want, but verify: Election Day was just cranking up when Twitter hoaxsters went to work, starting with phony exit poll numbers from the Sunshine State, ostensibly coming from an official CNN account which turned out not to be. It shared this little lopsided and fabricated report: BREAKING: The first Florida exit poll numbers have been released. Trump 55% Clinton 39% Johnson 6%— CNN (@CNN_PoIitics) Nov. 8, 2016. Trump did win Florida, somewhat unexpectedly but not quite that handily.

Even Sean Hannity makes mistakes: The radio host got caught with his proverbial pants down when he found, swallowed and ingested a large chunk of fresh fake news about President Obama supposedly erasing endorsements of Hillary from his Twitter account. That “news” prompted Hannity to suggest that Obama’s legacy might be “jail.” Trouble was, the claim could have been easily disproven with a quick search of Twitter. Hannity soon tweeted a very real correction and a supposedly sincere apology.

Now that’s American ingenuity: YourNewsWire, which was the carrier of the fake news Hannity feasted upon, publishes a mix of true, slanted and simply bogus news. Good clean fun, right? YourNewsWire is just one of many “news” sites that have come under the scrutiny of fact-checking groups like Real or Satire? Their staff has poked and prodded a whole range of suspicious actors, from the jokers over at News10Live.com to the all-in-good-fun guys behind Now8News.com, which Real or Satire? applauds because they at least have “the decency to provide a disclaimer: We thank Now8News for being upfront and honest about their site’s content.”

What kind of creeps is Hillary hanging around with anyway? Did you read the one from the The Denver Guardian? The headline says it all: FBI AGENT SUSPECTED IN HILLARY EMAIL LEAKS FOUND DEAD IN APPARENT MURDER-SUICIDE. While many Trump supporters fell for it, the story, and the website behind it were quickly outed. The Denver Guardian’s cover was blown by the very real Denver Post, a daily newspaper that’s been published since 1892 and is now part of MediaNews Group, which owns the news organization whose content you happen to be reading right now.

Mayor Riley is such a card: Jefferson Riley, the Republican mayor of Mansfield, Ga., and apparently quite the jester around City Hall, posted a bit of “fake news” of his very own: “Remember the voting days: Republicans vote on Tuesday, 11/8 and Democrats vote on Wednesday, 11/9,” he wrote on his Facebook page before eventually deleting but not perhaps before confusing many of the town’s elderly Democrats. “He’s a good man,” said City Clerk Jeana Hyde, who obviously works for Riley. “He’s a good mayor. And good people do crazy stuff sometimes.” Amen.

Was Trump a bit ham-fisted with this one? CNN corrected a tweet from the Republican nominee on Election Day that said “Just out according to @CNN: “Utah officials report voting machine problems across entire country.” CNN’s Jake Tapper quickly took to the air to correct Trump: “CNN is not reporting that. The problem is, the problem’s across the county. A county. Not a country, as Mr. Trump tweeted.” Well, at least Trump only missed it by one letter.

If that’s Christian, we’d hate to see what un-Christian looks like: Back in October, the Christian Times Newspaper broke a very big story: “Tens of thousands” of fraudulent ballots, apparently marked for Hillary Clinton, had been found in a warehouse in Ohio. They were allegedly discovered inside sealed ballot boxes. One website’s version of the story was shared with more than 6 million people, according to Crowdtangle, which is a site that keeps track of how social-media posts are performing. The sleuths at Snopes, though, quickly disproved the piece, just as they’re probably working to disprove this headline currently on the Christian Times website: “BREAKING: Hillary Clinton files for divorce in New York court.” The Christian Times’ disclaimer may offer a clue as to how to take its stories, describing the organization as “your premier online source for news, commentary, opinion, and theories. Christian Times Newspaper does not take responsibility for any of our readers’ actions that may result from reading our stories.”

So who was behind this one? Back in March, a bogus New York Times site posted an article claiming that Democratic firebrand Elizabeth Warren was endorsing Bernie Sanders for president. Not true. But it sure looked like the real thing, complete with the fonts and design of the real New York Times and the story even appeared under the (fake) bylines of two of its (real) political reporters. Before things got sorted out, the original bogus article had been shared by at least 700,000 people. And the top source of the shared link? It was a page called “Bernie Sanders – The Revolution Continues” on, yep. Facebook.

Finally, on Friday, four days after Trump’s election was a done deal, this little meme was making its rounds among the Internet’s gullible: Donald Trump back in 1998 allegedly calling Republicans “the dumbest group of voters in the country.” An image of Trump speaking, accompanied by the quote he allegedly made to People magazine, arrived last year in an email to Snopes, that fact-checking, urban-legend-busting organization that strives to get to the bottom of things.

Trump supposedly said “if I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.”

Snopes quickly debunked the whole thing, saying “despite People’s comprehensive online content archive, we found no interview or profile on Donald Trump in 1998 (or any other time) that quoted his saying anything that even vaguely resembled the words in this meme.”

Patrick May is an award-winning writer for the Bay Area News Group working with the business desk as a general assignment reporter. Over his 34 years in daily newspapers, he has traveled overseas and around the nation, covering wars and natural disasters, writing both breaking news stories and human-interest features. He has won numerous national and regional writing awards during his years as a reporter, 17 of them spent at the Miami Herald.

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